The Schwartz Cloud Report

HP Bursts into Hybrid Clouds

The company today announced what it describes as a "dual bursting" capability that will allow customers to add capacity from outside cloud providers when they have a spike in demand for capacity.

Bursting will be applied to CloudSystem, HP's turnkey appliance based on its converged BladeSystem server, storage and network-based hardware, loaded with the company's Cloud Service Automation (CSA) software. HP launched CloudSystem back in January.

"We are going to allow customers to dynamically provision and harness IT resources, bursting and grabbing them from an external service provider. Or, [if] there are security or compliance concerns, they will be able to burst internally, as well," said Steve Dietch, HP's VP of cloud solutions and infrastructure, speaking at a press conference at HP's Discover conference taking place this week in Las Vegas.

The first partner that HP's service will connect with is Savvis. It is in technical preview now and is slated for availability later this year, said Nick van der Zweep, HP's director of business strategy.

HP is recruiting other partners, including those in its CloudAgile program, also announced Tuesday. CloudAgile is a program intended to give partners access to HP's direct sales force and network of channel partners to create hybrid cloud deployments.

"We are going to incent our sales teams to collaborate to do the right thing for the customer, regardless of where that solution gets deployed from a hybrid perspective, whether it be on-premise or off-premise," Dietch said.

The first partners announced to the program include Verizon, NaviSite, OpSource, Datapipe, Axcient, SHI and Harris.

Also at its Discover conference Tuesday, HP released two new cloud security services: Vulnerability Scanning which, as the name implies, scans nodes within a customer's cloud infrastructure, and Vulnerability Intelligence, a service that provides alerts on new threats, providing the means to react to those threats.

HP says it has offered these services to its largest outsourcing customers for years but now is delivering them as a managed service.